By Chris McGrath
Three Grade I winners off the farm in 2024, out of a broodmare band of no more than 28–with dams respectively by Giant Gizmo, Majestic Warrior and Silent Name (Jpn). How do you pull off something like that? Well, Kiki Courtelis makes the customary acknowledgement of luck, and further professes a trust in divine dispensation. She also enthuses about her team at Town and Country. But just as the farm's name reconciles polarities, so its success reflects an inherited ability to turn a question inside out until it becomes an answer. Because when she reflects on her late father's remarkable story, Courtelis identifies his extraordinary ability, whenever presented with a problem, to recast it.
He had arrived into the melting pot of postwar America in 1947, aged 20. His parents had once done something similar themselves, in leaving Greece for Egypt.
“At that time, Alexandria to the Greeks was like Miami to the South Americans,” Courtelis explains. “But his own dream was always to come to this country. He didn't see a lot of opportunity in Egypt. And he got a first-class ticket, which meant he only had to share hammocks with 16 other people.”
He reached the real Miami to match aspiration with perspiration. His daughter lists his jobs, a breathless litany: “He mowed lawns and was a short-order cook and cleaned dance halls and chauffeured for the people he lived with…”
Just the four, then?
“Yes, but he was going to school full-time!” Courtelis replies. “He learned the language very quickly and went to the University of Miami. When he'd saved enough money, he rented half a duplex and rented out the two other rooms to professors, which enabled him to live there for free. So very entrepreneurial from the get-go. And he hit the ground running when he got out. Miami at that time needed someone like him.”
Which city wouldn't, at any time?
He started out testing concrete. His employers could see what they were dealing with. “You're going to end up on your own and we want to be part of that,” they told him. “So as you go on, remember us.”
And, duly with various partners along the way, he simply applied the same mindset to convert bigger and bigger challenges, in real estate and construction, into bigger opportunities.
“Because that was his philosophy,” Courtelis recalls. “Whenever he got stuck, there was always a way to reinvent the problem. For example, there was a beautiful piece of land being sold for 40 cents on the dollar. The problem was, the I-95 went right through the middle. He had investors ready to go and was so frustrated. And he kept going back there, walking round and round and asking himself how to move that road; how to reinvent the problem.
“He found out that the land either side of this parcel was all owned by the county. So he got his architect to draw up a whole development plan, took it to the county: 'I'm hoping you can help me with this.' They're seeing tax dollars coming in, they're real happy: 'Well, this is great. What's the problem, Mr. Courtelis?' And he rolls out the vellum paper, and here's I-95 right down the middle. And the county is like, 'Well, who owns this land over here?' Somebody says, 'We do, sir.' So they say, 'Well, Mr. Courtelis, why don't we move the road?' And my dad says, 'Now why didn't I think of that?!'”
By this time Alec Courtelis had married Louise (“Lulu”), a blind date at college, who loved horses. So, too, did their little girl, who was riding as early as two. The family's great affinity was with Arabians, and a growing involvement eventually extended–helped by his great friend Frank De Francis–to Alec's foundation of the Arabian Jockey Club of America, and the breed's introduction to racetracks such as Delaware.
These sensitive, loyal animals would prove a source of succor as Kiki and her mother absorbed the consecutive loss, to cancer, of both Alec and Kiki's brother Pan. But between a small foothold near Miami (town) and a massively expanded upstate site near Ocala (country), the farm had outgrown itself: boarding, raising and breaking not just their own string, but the entire Arabian breeding stock of Sheikh Mohammed.
“And, well, it's quite tiring to go through a couple of illnesses with a family,” Courtelis acknowledges. “And mom and I decided, 'We don't have to do this. We can just do our own.' And then she said, 'You know, what I really want is go to all Thoroughbreds.'”
That was 20 years ago. At first, they bred mares in Kentucky and took them to Florida to foal.
“But then four of our top mares lost their pregnancies,” Courtelis recalls. “So we realized we needed to keep them [in Kentucky] longer. And mom always wanted one of those pretty antebellum homes.”
In 2007 they found just the place, on the Russell Cave Road in Bourbon County. Shannon Potter, initially managing their account at TaylorMade, came aboard as president and together they adapted a proven family expertise with Arabians to a different breed. Call it reinventing a problem.
“If you're lunging an Arabian, and a truck dumps a load, the horse will come to you if it's afraid,” Courtelis explains. “Whereas the Thoroughbred will drag you down the road. Arabians are incredibly smart, can really bond with humans. Thoroughbreds are completely different, mentally. So one thing I've learned, that Shannon and I have tried to adopt, is to breed really good minds. Because that's what these Thoroughbreds need, to do what they do. I think a lot of attitude comes from the dam. But it's genetics too: the cross. I see that breeding dogs as well.”
Sure enough, whenever they asked Bob Baffert about the first foal (co-bred with Gary Broad) of their $95,000 Giant Gizmo mare, Brooklynsway, they were gratified to hear what lay beneath what became a $2 million, triple Grade I talent.
“Bob and his wife always said how everyone in the barn loved Adare Manor,” Courtelis remarks. “She was just very kind and then, when she got tacked up, became all business.”
Herself a graded stakes winner with the resilience for four campaigns, Brooklynsway had been acquired on retirement after failing to meet her reserve at $170,000. Her 2-year-old by Uncle Mo (i.e. brother to Adare Manor) was sold privately to join Todd Pletcher, and she's imminently expecting to Curlin.
Courtelis credits Potter with finding Brooklynsway. “She was very sound and had won on almost every surface,” Potter explains. “I've actually bought three Giant Gizmo mares, and they've all done really well. So it's a little crazy. It's not that I'm a huge Giant Gizmo fan but, as Kiki always says, sometimes you just need something that's a little different in a pedigree. It's the kind of thing I like to do: get a tough, hard-knocking mare, and breed her to one of the big-name stallions.”
A similar model, stakes-placed three years running, was Majestic Presence (Majestic Warrior), a $360,000 Keeneland November purchase in 2017. Her 2020 colt by Into Mischief made $850,000 in Book I at September; and his sister brought $500,000 a year later. Last spring, as Newgate and Denim and Pearls, they respectively won the GI Santa Anita Handicap and GII Beaumont Stakes a month apart.
The third farm graduate with a 2024 elite score was GI Hollywood Derby winner Formidable Man (City of Light), sold the same September as Denim and Pearls for $375,000. He's out of Fanticola (Silent Name {Jpn}), another hardy campaigner (Grade II winner, raced to six) who had been a $270,000 KeeNov RNA in 2016. (Luckily for purchasers Clear Creek Stud, she slipped the net when returned to the equivalent sale in 2021, culled for $60,000.)
So while the private acquisition of the blatantly talented Stopchargingmaria (Tale of the Cat) duly took Courtelis and Lulu to the GI Breeders' Cup Distaff in 2015, other pivotal investments have required more imagination.
“If anybody knew exactly what the science behind it was–what's going to make a runner or broodmare, or what's not–you wouldn't have all these people going round the sales searching,” Potter observes. “The whole thing would collapse. And that's just what's so great about the game: you never know. It's the surprise, the gamble.”
As Courtelis emphasizes, however, the odds are reduced by her team at the farm, headed by manager Kirt Cahill and assistant Martin Deanda.
“Oh gosh, they're awesome,” she says. “Hands-on from birth all the way until we see them go. There's not a better team that grabs ahold of those animals from the get-go, and loves them like their own. We're very blessed.”
The objective is to make Town and Country a viable commercial farm: everything goes to the ring, albeit some with more aggressive reserves than others. But it's all far more boutique than the farm's original incarnation, which eventually accommodated 300 of Sheikh Mohammed's Arabians and 100 of their own on 1,100 acres–and, as such, eroded precisely those connections that make that breed special.
“I don't miss that scale,” Courtelis admits. “I like having a much more intimate setting for the horses. That way we know them better, too. They're not just a number. And because we have so few mares, we can really give them so much hands-on.”
“And watch them pretty close without putting bubble wrap around them,” adds Potter. “We let them be a horse, turn them out and let them do their thing. But we can analyze and scrutinize the feed, from supplements before birth all the way through.”
“We try to be very proactive,” agrees Courtelis. “I'm not a wait-and-see kind of person. But no, it's never an exact science.”
All the more important, then, to deploy an instinct that conflates the benign legacies of her parents: her mother's horsemanship, her father's business verve.
Courtelis only lost Lulu in 2023, 28 years after her father. “She had this kitchen table, and when her home was sold Shannon and I knew we had to figure out a place to put it, because all our decisions were made around that table–with her leading the discussion,” Courtelis says. “She was always right in the thick of it, really was the heart. She'd get in that car every morning and drive around the farm saying hi to everybody…”
“…And then call and tell us what we were doing wrong!” intervenes Potter with a chuckle. “Of course, part of it is being able to accept failure, too. Because that's going to happen more often than success. Meaning, 'Hey, messed up. Figure it out. Go on to the next.' As one of our trainers always says, 'Never get too high in this game–and never get too low.'”
“Shannon and I have a very strong faith,” adds Courtelis. “We trust that failures are there for us to learn from, and that they're a blessing also.”
But if you think about it, that mindset is just a twist on her father's determination to reset any problem.
“He had such a creative way of thinking, and I've tried to adopt that in what I'm doing here,” Courtelis says. “A few years back I found myself at the September Sale with only two of five Book I yearlings sold. So I thought to myself: 'Reinvent the problem.' The year before, in November, I'd bought some beautiful mares, pregnant to fabulous stallions, so I packaged three of them together and sold pieces in 10 percent increments. And that saved us at a time when the business was very low.
“But in the end, always, it all comes back to the horses. I've done many other things: retail, restaurants. But it's the horses that have my heart. I'm so blessed to be able to do it, and I'll carry on as long as I can.”
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